Using Vicuna 13B on GCP Vertex AI

Implementation guide · Vicuna · LMSYS Org

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GCP Vertex AI exposes Vicuna 13B through model ID vicuna-13b. Use the setup steps, sourced pricing, capabilities, and official provider links below to validate this route before deployment.

Last refreshed 2026-06-15. Next refresh: weekly.

Quick Start

  1. 1
    Create an account at GCP Vertex AI and generate an API key.
  2. 2
    Use the GCP Vertex AI SDK or REST API to call vicuna-13b — see the documentation for request format.

Code Examples

Install
pip install google-cloud-aiplatform
API key
GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT
Model ID
vicuna-13b

For Google-published models use the model name directly, e.g. "gemini-2.0-flash-001". For third-party publishers (Anthropic, Meta, etc.) use the full publisher path, e.g. "publishers/anthropic/models/claude-3-5-sonnet-v2@20241022".

import os
import vertexai
from vertexai.generative_models import GenerativeModel

# Reads GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT from env; authenticates via Application Default Credentials
vertexai.init(project=os.environ["GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT"], location="us-central1")
model = GenerativeModel("vicuna-13b")
response = model.generate_content("Hello")
print(response.text)

Pricing on GCP Vertex AI

Capabilities

Structured Outputs

About Vicuna 13B

Vicuna-13B is a finely-tuned open-source chatbot derived from the LLaMA model and developed with around 70,000 user-shared conversations from ShareGPT. Built on the robust Transformer architecture, it features a substantial 13-billion parameter scale. Early evaluations indicate it achieves over 90% of the effectiveness of models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard, surpassing other open-source models such as LLaMA and Stanford Alpaca in various scenarios. Training data includes user conversations initially captured in HTML and converted to markdown for quality filtering.

Model Specs

Released2023-10-23
Parameters13B
Context2k
ArchitectureDecoder Only
Knowledge cutoff2022

Provider

GCP Vertex AI

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Mountain View, California, United States